What We Do
Our Work
Our donors and charities are at the heart of everything we do. As a leading and neutral convener, The Community Foundation of Singapore (CFS) helps individual and corporate donors drive greater impact through effective giving to build a better future for all in Singapore. We endeavour to provide support where needed, improve quality of life through social support, culture, arts and sports, and enhance our living environment through green initiatives.
Drawing on over a decade of experience, CFS is a thought leader in strategic philanthropy. Together with leading organisations, we provide philanthropic advice for global family offices, investments by trusts and foundations, and legacy giving.
We constantly strive to expand our network with charities, government agencies, and researchers, keeping a close eye on emerging needs in the community and discovering meaningful funding opportunities to offer to our donors. We aim to amplify philanthropy and legacy through our partnerships with professional advisors and ambassadors.
Our Services
Philanthropy advisory
Leveraging CFS’s expertise in grantmaking, our philanthropy consultants will work with donors to identify funding opportunities.
Fund administration
CFS handles all the administration required in managing donors’ funds. Donors will also receive regular updates on their funds, allowing them to focus on their philanthropy.
Safeguarding grants
CFS ensures all grants are made with high levels of care and accountability, along with reporting on major grants.
Keeping donors engaged
CFS provides donors with opportunities to deepen their understanding of the local landscape in Singapore.
Our Funds
Donor-Advised Funds
CFS helps donors to set up a donor-advised fund (DAF) – a charitable fund account to which an individual or organisation can contribute, to support causes that they are passionate about.
A donor can choose to set up either a flow-through fund or endowment fund with us. Donations via a flow-through fund will be spent down in grantmaking, while the principal sum donated to an endowment fund is invested to generate an annual stream of income for grantmaking in perpetuity. To learn more about DAFs, please click here.
Community Impact Funds
Community Impact Funds (CIFs) are flagship programmes established by CFS in partnership with charities to address unmet needs or under-supported social issues in Singapore. CFS takes a ground-up approach to understand the needs of care recipients and outcomes they care about to ensure that they would truly benefit from these programmes.
A CIF is a pooled fund that anyone can support to raise awareness and funding for a particular cause. The Sayang Sayang Fund, set up in 2020, is our latest CIF. To learn more about CIFs, please click here.
Striving Ahead
Accelerating operational excellence and digital transformation
CFS has embarked on a journey to digitalise and optimise our operations and improve our services. The next phase will see us accelerating our plans across the organisation. These include streamlining our operations with a fully integrated system encompassing donor management, programmes and grant management, financial and data management to boost efficiency and data analysis by offering users a single source of data. We will also be implementing an enhanced risk and corporate governance framework to better manage risk and enable proactive management of policy and governance documentation.
Our Commitment to Sustainability
CFS plans to introduce more sustainable practices in different areas of our work and organisation. Operationally, CFS aims to reuse, reduce and recycle and better manage our paper and plastic consumption. We have also implemented a Daily Earth Hour. Externally, CFS will continue to engage charities to source for more programmes across the spectrum of Sustainable Development Goals for our donors. We will also include more sustainability considerations in our programme assessments, to ensure greater value creation over the longer term.
Deepening Charity Partnerships for Greater Impact
CFS’s Charities and Grants Team will deepen our charity partnerships to increase the range of impactful programmes that our donors can support. We will review our processes to enhance collaboration with charities in programme proposal submissions, grantmaking and reporting. An innovative framework will be established to assess and guide impact measurement in closer partnership with charities.
